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Tuesday, May 1, 2012

If I had a penny for every time I had been asked by somebody to create them a viral video or how to get millions of views on Youtube I would be a very rich man indeed. People think they produce a video (usually of a corporate office setting with a new product announcement), put it on Youtube and all they have to do then is sit back and watch the video views roll in. As anybody who knows anything about online video will tell you the chances are your video will get a couple of hundred views at best. So how do you get the word out about your video online and increase the amount of people who see it on Youtube? Here are some of the little tips and tricks that will help you…

Make Friends And Network On Youtube

People think of Youtube as a place to watch videos but just like any of the other social networking sites there are plenty of ways to interact with other users and engage with the community. You’ll need to start befriending people within your niche, sending them private messages and complimenting them on their own videos and leaving comments wherever relevant. This is a slow process and is very similar to leaving comments on other blogs to grow blog traffic and although it takes lots of time it is highly effective.

Add Annotations To Your Videos

So annotations are getting easier to add on Youtube and although the biggest fault the system has it that it doesn’t let you link out to 3rd party sites (huge spam issues would arise) annotations do help you to grow subscribers. Have a look at the last 10 seconds of our video below and you’ll see a couple of links to our own channel and to our “about us” video. Used correctly (and there are tons of creative ways in which you can do this) annotations are an easy way for you to quickly drive some new subscribers to your channel or views to other videos that might not have been getting so much traffic.

Grow Your Subscriber Base

If there is one sure fire way to give your videos a little boost on Youtube then it is to have subscribers. A subscriber is somebody who will be alerted with an email every single time you upload a new video and their value should not be underestimated. Having somebody make that commitment to you is massive and channels with a couple of hundred subscribers is a great way to get your views up and if the video is good enough it should spread organically from those couple of hundred people to many others.

Tag And Describe Your Video Correctly

Although over the years Youtube has made every effort to improve video search most of the search is still done through text and tags. This means that you need to take lots of care when you are filling out your description and title and make sure to add as many relevant tags as you possibly can. Remember that Youtube is the second biggest search engine in the world after Google and that people could be searching for the content in your video right now so make sure you give them all they need to find it.

Thumbnails

Thumbnails for those of you not familiar with the term are the little images that appear before you click through to a video. You can select which image appears on the back end of Youtube once your video has uploaded and it is vitally important that you select something that is going to entice people to click immediately. Remember that when people search on Youtube they will be presented with 100s of results so in order for your video to stand out it needs to be highly visible.

Embed The Video And Share Wherever You Can

This is a very obvious one but there is a good chance that most of your views are not going to come on Youtube itself but mostly from third party websites. You should certainly have the video on your own website or blog if relevant and make use of your social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter to get the video going. If you have any friends who might be willing to push it out for you that can work well and if you think the video might be relevant to another blogger or website there is no harm in asking if they would like to feature it.

Create Signposts Or Links To Your Video

The old saying that people use for websites “build it and they will come” rings very true for video as well (they won’t actually come no matter how great you think your website/video is). There are millions of other pieces of content out on the web that are as good if not better than what you have produced so you are going to have to work at it and really spread the word about your video. Creating links and virtual “sign posts” to your video is going to be the key. You’ll see a little subscribe button over on the right of our page here on the blog, the Youtube logo appears on all our email signatures and we link through from Facebook and Twitter and all our other social media profiles.

Leave Video Responses

This is one that works incredibly well but it does take time to implement. Basically any video that is out there on YouTube can have video responses left to it (you’ll often see them along the bottom of the main video). You actually have to submit these yourself as a user and if the owner of the original video thinks that they are good enough they will allow it to appear as a video response. You will have to go through videos manually to find places where your videowill have a chance of getting accepted but it’s a great way to get you video in front of people in your niche who are clearly interested in a similar video and who might just click through to yours next. Again if you have followed the first step of effectively networking with other Youtube users then there is a good chance that plenty of people will accept your video response requests.